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The Rainbow Six series has never been known for overly generous expansion packs. Most of the time, you don't get much more than a few maps, which you'd normally get for free if you'd been playing a game with more robust support for third-party mods and map-making.

At first, Athena Sword doesn't seem like it's going to be an exception. The checklist reads like almost any other expansion from the series: new single-player missions, some new multiplayer maps, a handful of guns of dubious value, and perhaps a few new modes to tweak the basic gameplay. But then you'll stumble across the "Capture the Enemy" multiplayer mode, which is a spirited version of freeze tag with guns. This is the brightest new thing for the series since it was ported over to the Unreal engine.

Capture the Enemy is sort of a variation of the "Jailbreak" mods that began with Quake. The idea is that when you've "killed" an enemy, he doesn't die. Instead, he gets captured. But unlike Jailbreak, in which a captured player is instantly teleported to jail, here he stops in place and puts up his hands for a short time. If you get to him while he's surrendered, you can cuff him, effectively knocking him out of the action. However, if his teammates reach him, they can uncuff him. The team that manages to cuff all the guys on the other team wins. Otherwise, the match is decided by the number of captures once the time limit is up.

Fresh meat... and those steaks look pretty new, too.

While this sounds fairly straightforward, it adds a giddy new dimension to Rainbow Six and Raven Shield's normally brief and decisive gameplay. The lethality of the weapons guarantees that encounters are over quickly. And once you're dead, you're stuck spectating until the next round starts. But in Capture the Enemy, there's always a chance you might be rescued. What's more, since the window of surrender is so short, and since there's a brief period of invulnerability immediately after you've recovered from a surrender, there's a lot of wild shooting, running, yelling, laughing, and generally mucking about like a bunch of kids playing paint ball. This adds not only a considerable amount of ammo chew -- it's actually useful to bring extra ammo, since you might "kill" the other guys repeatedly -- but it introduces some levity to the methodical and tense gameplay. With Capture the Enemy, Rainbow Six at last loosens its tie and gets a little crazy.